According to the mayor's office, there has not been a single murder reported in New York City since Oct. 6.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has seized on gun crime as one of the central issues of his legacy, both as mayor of New York City and as someone with enough wealth to exert significant pressure on legislators around the country.

As his tenure nears its end, talk of the legacy he will leave behind has focused largely on the negative perception of his consistent, emphatic defense of the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk practice, and the notion that he is not in touch with the experiences and day-to-day reality of lower-income New Yorkers.

But the efficacy of his work on gun violence seems undeniable: murders committed with guns are down nearly 29 percent this year compared to last year, with a total of 148 fatal shootings this year through Sunday, Oct. 13 and 208 last year over the same period.

This drop is an achievement he has pointed to in asserting that he does, in fact, care about low-income minority communities, as the vast majority of New Yorkers affected by gun crime are low-income members of minority communities.

The mayor's office has been fastidiously tracking the decrease in gun crime over the last year compared to 2012, and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly recently noted that the murder rate in New York City is dramatically lower than that in other major U.S. cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Chicago.